‘What is that?’ I said, after chewing and unexpectedly finding cherries packed inside.
‘It’s Australian.’
I coughed a bit. ‘Has that been in your pocket since you flew back from Australia?’
‘No. I brought it in my luggage and got one out today.’
I pressed my lips together. ‘You often carry a bar of chocolate around with you, just in case you’re peckish?’
‘You never know when you might need one.’ He shrugged and the pink in his cheeks wasn’t from the cold anymore.
‘That is so true.’ I laughed. He was like the child-catcher except he lured horny women in with his gorgeous face and sexy hip thrusts, then melted their ovaries with the offer of chocolate. Okay, maybe that was just me but still, it was almost aggressive to be that attractive a human being. I took one more bite and then handed his chocolate back to him because I figured if it meant enough to him that he’d fly it across the world, he wouldn’t want to watch me eating it all.
It was also strangely intimate when I saw him take a bite. The part where my mouth was, now on his tongue…
‘It was good of you to take Lydia home.’ I uncurled my legs, making a production of stretching my feet towards the fire and pulling my skirt down just to avoid looking at his mouth anymore.
‘I wanted to try and help.’ The smile disappeared and he frowned, crumpling up the empty wrapper and stuffing it into his shot glass. ‘Since I didn’t earlier.’
‘Youcouldn’tdrive them earlier. You’d have been over the limit. The last thing Rachel needed was her only means of transport to get wrapped around a tree.’
He nodded a bit and turned abruptly to slide his glass onto the table behind us. This time his elbow touched my shoulder. I was starting to feel like one of those cut-out figures at a shooting range and every place he touched me was a bullet hole, except it wasn’t a gaping wound left behind, it was exactly the opposite; concentrated sensation blooming, heat radiating out.
Bang. He reached out for my empty glass too, which I had rested on my leg. He gently detached it from my grip, and I was bleeding pure desire as the ghost of his hand grazed over my thigh. I couldn’t move, I was frozen and because I was also scared he would notice, I grasped desperately for something to say to cover it up. ‘So, should my ears have been burning while you were with Lydia?’
He leaned back on his hands, looking into the fire and tilting his head to the side before glancing over at me. The flames of the fire reflected in his glasses, but I could still read a twinkle of amusement. ‘Probably.’
‘Look don’t mince your words. That’s a “yes” isn’t it?’ I half groaned, half laughed, relaxing a little, because honestly, if anything was guaranteed to stop something happening between Nick and I, it was having my mother’s best friend bending his ear about my life story. ‘What has she been telling you?’
‘Probably nothing more embarrassing than my nan told you before I arrived.’ He was joking but there was a shadow across his face. Fine lines at the edges of his mouth that told me he was still worrying about that. Perhaps wondering if I knew he’d lost his mum recently and whether that was affecting the way I was treating him.
Because it was. I knew it from losing my dad. There was the way people looked at you before they knew and the way they looked afterwards. And despite experiencing this myself, I couldn’t deny the knowledge of Nick’s grief was making me read him differently. Whether that was a bad thing or not, I couldn’t say. It didn’tseema bad thing; someone treating you with a little extra kindness and consideration when you were in pain, no harm in that right? But on the flip side, it was like an erasure. It made you the sum of your loss. And it’s hard enough to get back to living and remembering who you are or finding out who you can be, without constantly wearing the label of bereavement.
‘Well, your nan told me you were a pilot.Anythingis more embarrassing than that. Being a pilot is not on the embarrassment scale.’
He shook his head. ‘Look I’m not knocking it; I love being a pilot. But really? I’m a glorified bus driver. It doesn’t warrant that much…reverence. Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Cruise have a lot to answer for.’
‘Maybeit’s that. They do look very good in a uniform.’ I leaned back on my hands, mirroring his posture without consciously deciding to. ‘Butit could also be the fact that you can handle one of the most amazing, complicated pieces of engineering the human race has come up with. It’sflying, Nick. Up in the sky. People aren’t meant to be in the sky.’
He gave me the full-on smile then. The one that made my heart jump like I’d just been jolted back to life with defibrillator paddles. ‘Yeah all right,’ he conceded. ‘It is pretty amazing. But I can’t play a concerto or teach someone to play the guitar or run a hotel.’
‘Oh God, shewastalking about me?’
‘A little. But I already knew about the guitar and the hotel without her needing to tell me.’
‘I can’t run a hotel.’
‘Are you sure? Because it looks like that’s what you’re doing.’
‘I’m doing a very bad impression of Basil Fawlty, is what I’m doing.’ I rubbed my forehead hard, as though I could erase from my mind the sudden flood of problems I had to deal with, many of which I’d caused, and the consequences if I failed.
‘Hey.’ He caught my hand and pulled it gently away from my face, wrapping it in his. His fingers were still cool from his walk in the snow and the electric chill of it made my whole body jolt. He leaned over towards me, his voice a brush of kindness before he even said anything more. ‘You’re doing a great job.’
As soon as I heard it my craving for him ramped up from the purely physical and became a serious threat because I really needed to hear that. So much.Toomuch.
But how could I believe him? What did he know about running a hotel?
Unless he knew a lot about it because he was always inspecting them for his blog.
